Visual Resources holds a unique collection of photographic prints made in 1929/30, showing the Vrysaki neighborhood of Athens pre-1931 demolition, along with various other sites and monuments, including Hadrian's Library, the Medrese, the Tower of the Winds, the Roman Agora, and the broader Plaka area. These photographs were taken at the behest of the Excavation of the Athenian Agora, led by the American School of Classical Studies. The collection consists of a large map of the neighborhood, with each building lot identified, and numbers indicating where each photograph was taken. There are also 88 contact prints in total signed by the photographer “M. Messinesi,” with 13 oversized (measuring roughly 36” x 24”) and the rest 16” x 20.” These are all in the process of being photographed professionally.  

The Messinesi collection is part of the larger Homer A. Thompson collection. Thompson was the director of the excavations of the Athenian Agora from 1931 until 1970 and joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1947, after which he occasionally taught in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Because of Thompson’s appointments in both Princeton and Athens he maintained excavation archives at each location. The Princeton archive, now within the Department of Art and Archaeology, is mostly a duplicate of the original records in Athens, except for the small collection of photographs and map by Messinesi. A comprehensive, searchable database of the records of the excavation in Athens can be found online. However, the Thompson collection in Princeton has not been digitized. 

The Messinesi collection will be part of the Digital Humanities for Hellenic Studies 2025 Summer Institute focused on methods for mapping and spatial visualizations and will take place at Princeton’s Athens Center in Athens, Greece. Once the workshop has been completed, the Messinesi collection will be added to the rest of the department’s digital collections online, along with a full description of the larger Homer A. Thompson collection. 

The Princeton and Mount Athos Legacy Project

This project aims to explore and bring awareness to the rich, complex, and remarkable historical and cultural heritage of Mount Athos in Greece, and its connection to Princeton. Mount Athos is an autonomous region in Greece housing more than 20 Orthodox monasteries. This peninsula, while small and remote, has had a deep spiritual, cultural, and artistic influence throughout the centuries, capturing the imagination of visitors, travelers, and pilgrims. VR's contributions to this exciting project includes the digitization of Kurt Weitzmann's collection of photographic negatives of manuscripts from Mount Athos. 

Howard Crosby Butler's Syrian Expedition Transcription Project

The expeditions to Syria organized by Howard Crosby Butler produced a number of large, very comprehensive publications which have been digitized by Heidelberg University and can be accessed here and here. These publications were created from the sketches, notebooks, and drawings from the archive. Our ongoing, crowdsourcing project in the platform From the Page aims to transcribe the notebooks from the expeditions, which include descriptions of people and places not present in the published volumes. This first phase of transcription work  will be followed by the transcription of the surveyors' notebooks and other data heavy documents. Another phase of the project, currently in progress, relates the names of the locations the expeditions visited with their modern geographical location and name so that we can submit these as documented sites of the ancient world to Pleiades.

The Sinai Digital Archive is a collaborative digital project that supports inter-institutional sharing of archives into a single, public, and scholarly resource. The project makes available for study, teaching, and research the vast collections of icons, manuscripts, liturgical objects, and archival material from the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai. This website brings together for the first time the photographic archives from the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to Sinai in 1956, 1958, 1960, 1963, and 1965, now held in the Visual Resources Collections at Princeton University and the University of Michigan.